Room Finder

My first UX project

Remember those university days where you had to go to great lengths to find a place to have group meetings? I had my fair share of it and searching for an empty room at a university (Indiana University Bloomington to be exact) the size of a small city with a population of more than 40000 students was no fun at all. In fact, the first 15 mins of my group meetings are often spent finding a room rather than discussing about the project itself. I questioned why aren’t there any website or app that can help us find and reserve rooms for meetings on campus? The technology is already there, and I had a rough idea of what it could look like. It was there where I decided that this idea cannot stay in my head any longer, I took a piece of paper drawing what I visioned this app could look like and that’s how my ideas became my very first UX prototype.

First Draft

I first started by listing down all the factors involved when it comes finding a room, this includes time, place, room size, as well as what equipments we require for the meeting. From there I also listed all the things a room reservation system would need. This would include the ability to make reservations, view and edit your reservations as well as deleting them. Using inspiration fro various other websites, I then drew a simple layout of how the system would look like on a website, figuring out what pages are needed and the user flow of these pages. That layout eventually turned into low fidelity wireframe, and then to colored prototype on invision.

Redesign

My mistake with this was that I jumped straight to the prototype without doing the necessary testing and research. It was when I had my first prototype reviewed by my fellow peers where I realized I was missing some key elements that would have made the system pointless.

Mistake 1: I made this product for web when many of its targeted users admitted that they tend to only reserve rooms at the very last minute on the go, so providing it on a mobile app would make better sense.

Mistake 2: I failed to include the distance of the rooms from the user’s current location, hence users may accidentally select a room that is too far away.

Mistake 3: I left out a sort feature in the reservation page which many users claimed to be very important.